Archive for the ‘economics’ Category

It seems obvious to me that our ruling elite has been getting less and less elite, less and less intelligent, since around 1875, and I have previously produced a great pile of anecdotal data on this subject, for example the endless dumbing down of university entrance tests throughout the twentieth century, the hilarious conversations found in the Challenger inquiry archives, showing spectacular examples of pointy haired boss syndrome, the staff of the World Bank, Obama’s scriptwriters, and so on and so forth.

Purging engineers for real, suspected, or imagined heresy, seemed to me to purge the smartest engineers – seemed to me that whether or not smarts equate to heresy, smarts are suspected to equate with heresy regardless of whether the suspect is really a heretic or not, much as the Khmer Rouge wound up murdering everyone who wore glasses. They did not intend to murder everyone who wore glasses, or even intend to murder intellectuals. If you told one of them they were murdering all the intellectuals he would not have believed you. He would have said “We are intellectuals, would we murder ourselves?” (And immediately thereafter the secret police would have dragged him away to the torture chambers because of excessively complicated sentence construction, leading to suspicions of disloyalty and plots, much as the New York Times gets agitated because it is unable to parse sentences spoken by Sarah Palin.)

The probability of entering and remaining in an intellectually elite profession such as Physician, Judge, Professor, Scientist, Corporate Executive, etc. increases with IQ to about 133. It then falls about 1/3 by 140. By 150 IQ the probability has fallen by 97%!

Observing heresy persecutions in engineering, looks to me to a good approximation, they are getting rid of everyone above 145, that everyone above three standard deviations is excluded from engineering or science in high status firms, so I am unsurprised by Ferguson’s report that the same applies in academia, law, and so forth.

Looks like they are recruiting people two standard deviations above the norm, but purging anyone significantly smarter, whether out of deliberate hostility to dangerously smart people, or because smart people exclude women and blacks.

When a female engineer tries to talk to a smart engineer, she finds it hard to talk to him about engineering, so she concludes he raped her repeatedly and demands a million dollars in compensation. Thus the exclusion of smart people could be inadvertent, as the extermination of smart people was with Khmer Rouge. The purging of smart engineers appears to be inadvertent, a byproduct of including women. Likely the same thing is happening to judges, as I see happening to engineers. I see engineers, don’t see judges. Ferguson sees judges.

Ferguson’s data does not address whether problem is getting worse or better. My anecdotal information indicates that the problem is getting worse, and has been getting worse since around 1870 or so. You notice that smart members of the elite, like Rumsfeld, are much older than regular members, and that when they say something that shows that they are smart, all the chimps get rattled, start shrieking and flinging poop.

The elite:

OK, I hear you saying, these are two dumb as toad dropping nigger scum who won the debate because black and female.

But could not they find someone black and female who had an IQ above retarded?

OK then, lets look for a white male Jewish member of the elite chosen for his performance in a STEM field. Aaron Swartz. Official genius. a Fellow of Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

Aaron Swartz conspicuously lacked hacking and social skills.

If he had been marginally competent at computers, he could have downloaded millions of documents from JSTOR through the MIT network without bringing the MIT network to a screaming halt, without committing burglary and vandalism against the MIT network administrators, without creating side effects that every single user of the MIT network noticed and was enraged by.

If he had been marginally competent at social skills, he would have known that despite the fact that the police and prosecutors were treating him as just another dumb no account petty crook, who got videotaped by security cameras performing criminal acts and got bagged by security, he was not going to prison, not going to be convicted, that he was still a member of the elite that never goes to jail or gets convicted no matter how stupid the crimes they commit.

If he had any of the normal prosocial qualities like diligence and forethought, would have found a way to hack the MIT network that was not blindingly obvious to every single user of the network.

Aaron Swartz, Jewish Harvard fellow, official genius, is only marginally smarter than the two retarded black ghetto scum that won the debate.

Now you can find genuinely smart members of the elite, for example Larry Summers. But notice: They are getting mighty long in the tooth.; whereas when you find a conspicuously retarded member of the elite, like Aaron Schwartz, they are very young. This is an elite that is getting dumber. When the likes of Larry Summers retire, they will be replaced by the likes of Aaron Swartz.

This is an elite that has been getting steadily dumber since 1875 or so. And it has been getting dumber faster.

Larry Summers born 1954. Aaron Swartz, official genius, born 1987.

A lot of people looking at the war powers debate say, ahh, that was Jews making black people look stupid. Well Aaron Swartz did not make Jews look smart.

Using money as a store of value is inherently problematic. One can store value as canned beans, as rice, but as money?

The usual trick to this is to lend money to young people to build homes and start families. The value is stored in their home, the bank holds a lot of mortgages to these homes, and these back a lot of on demand deposits.

This creates the notorious problem of term transformation, which can be ameliorated by flexible interest rate mortgages – or by an alarming willingness of the government to print money for cronies, but I am here addressing a different problem.

Suppose there are not enough young people building homes and starting families.

We then face the problem of money with nowhere to be stored. So the natural rate of interest falls to zero and tries to go negative So instead of storing it in young people’s promises to work hard and build a life for their families, we store it in taxpayer futures. Governments borrow to buy votes, and to “stimulate the economy” So money is backed by a liability on taxpayers.

An ever larger liability on ever fewer taxpayers.

But, surely money can store value even if backed by absolutely nothing. Money is always a bubble. So why worry. How can the capacity of government to borrow enormous amounts of money at negative real interest rates be a bad thing. Surely the interest rates that governments are paying show that our governments are more solvent than ever. The decline of the high IQ working taxpaying population and its replacement by people on welfare and single women in makework jobs has been a huge bonanza for governments, that has deluged them with free money. Indeed, the more single women in makework jobs, the less they will reproduce, and the more money the government can borrow.

Assuming a virtuous and competent government, a deluge of free money is not going to cause that government any harm. If, on the other hand, we assume government thinks no further ahead than the next election …

The last time I posted this, people did not like the trefoil graphic, and proposed the triquetra, which has the handy property of symbolizing both Odinism and Christianity. So here is the improved graphic.

We need capitalism, because we need wealth and technology, we need patriarchy and tradition, to uphold the enforcement of the marital contract without which our population will disappear, and to keep ethnonationalism in line to prevent ethnonationalism from devouring capitalism with socialism and demotism, and we need ethnonationalism to prevent outsiders from devouring our society and our capitalism with it.

In fourteen years, America went from three times the size of the Chinese economy to slightly smaller, and the rate of relative decline shows every sign of quite rapidly accelerating.

Chinese GPD per capita is still substantially lower than American GDP per capita, but the number of Chinese with middle class lifestyles is arguably larger than the number of Americans with middle class lifestyles, and will soon become a great deal larger.

According to the Whig/Marxist version of history, the roots of the Industrial revolution were in the Glorious Revolution, which represented the rights of man and the rising political power of businessmen.

There are several problems with this story. One is that the rise of China decisively proves that the rights of corporations matter a whole lot more for economic development than the rights of man, and if you are looking for the origin of the rights of corporations, you are looking at the Restoration. (more…)

If you ask what are total estimated reserves of some resource, and divide by the amount produced and consumed, the answer is usually about ten years or so – and has been about ten years for the last several thousand years, because people who look for resources look for resources that they intend to use in the near future, and if they find more than they can use in the near future, they forget about them or conceal them, for fear someone else will go after them.

Their primary income comes from advertisers, who pay them to show ads to nerds.

And this is what Gawker has to say about nerds.

Ultimately GamerGate is reaffirming what we’ve known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission

Upon receiving a hostile reaction from their audience:

@hamiltonnolan @Based_Tet@max_read Max just told me I’m getting a raise because I made gamers cry

And, when the advertisers did not like that, that is nothing compared to what they said about advertisers.

Intel is run by craven idiots. It employs pusillanimous morons. It lacks integrity. It folded to misogynists and bigots who objected to a woman who had done nothing more than write a piece claiming a place in the world of video games. And even when confronted with its own thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, it could not properly right its wrongs.

And, did I mention that Gawker is anticapitalist?

It is apparent that many of the writers attacking gamergate do not have skin in the game with their own publications. They are willing to burn their boss’ companies and quite likely it will help their career. They’ll keep riling up the mob because they think it means greater notoriety and promotions later on. The longer that they keep riling up the mob, the worse terms that they will get for the companies that they work for, but they are fine with that.

To bypass the first amendment, the government has been systematically installing political commissars in every company. This has the unintended effect that nominally private companies tend to wind up controlled by the state sponsored left.

In any nominally private organization controlled by the left, people get power and promotions not for actions that benefit shareholders, but for actions that benefit the left.

If shareholders lose control, the logical behavior then is to max out every company credit card and company line of credit, pile up everything moveable and take it to the pawnbroker, rip the copper wiring out of the walls, and set fire to company headquarters to collect the insurance.

Hollywood has long been controlled by the left, and by and large, for the most part there are no longer continuing corporations, Hollywood studios, that own production assets, have valued brand names, and regularly produce one movie after another. Rather, people usually get together case by case to produce a movie.

Surviving Hollywood corporations tend to be notoriously under attack for insufficient leftism, for example Disney, and often their movies contain subtle hints of less than total capitulation But even they are tending to outsource their real production to off the radar contractors, while they stuff their nominal production departments with politicals, a process that ends in the company being eaten out by the politicals, and replaced by teams of contractors that come together contract by contract, project by project.

Tim Cook has not ripped the copper out the walls and set fire to Apple headquarters – not yet, but he has rather casually burned Apple’s major asset – that it was the high quality, high status brand name, that its stuff just worked.

The modern world was created by the joint stock corporation with the CEO kept answerable to the shareholders by double entry accounting. When King Charles the Second let joint stock corporations off the leash they, in addition to pillaging the third world, used science to build technology, and the resulting technology enabled science, massively raising everyone’s standard of living, including that of third worlders and even of slaves shipped from the third world to the first.

Sarbanes Oxley has destroyed double entry accounting, and politicizing corporations has disempowered the shareholders. In America and Europe, the social technology that brought us science and the industrial revolution is being dismantled.

The social technology that made the west wealthy and knowledgeable survives in Hong Kong and Singapore, and is spreading to China. It has been successfully transplanted to Dubai by their high IQ aristocracy (Some aristocracies eugenically breed themselves smart), and, surprisingly, is doing fine in Nigeria. (I conjecture that in Nigeria a hidden consortium of white and east asian capitalists bribe the government into doing the right thing, always a dangerous mode of existence since the government is always tempted to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.)

A politically correct Harvard paper “Asiaphoria Meet Regression to the Mean” by the politically correct authors Lant Pritchett and Larry Summers tells us, or seemingly tells us, that China’s rapid growth is unlikely to last. They examine fifty or so periods of rapid growth, and, almost always, sad to say, there is regression to the mean. In the long run, the periods of rapid growth make little difference.

These are, unlike your usual Harvard intellectual, genuinely smart people, and, for smart Harvard people, surprisingly truthful. And, if you take a powerful microscope, read between the lines, read what is unwritten, you will read the truth. If you listen to what they are not saying, you will hear the truth.

There are a near infinite variety of ways to have bad or negative economic growth. There is one way to have good economic growth, and if your country is Cathedral Compliant, it is not allowed to do things that one way.

Instead of just noticing that periods of rapid economic growth tend to come to a sad end, Lant and Larry took a look at these sad ends.

nearly every country that experienced a large democratic transition after a period of above-average growth (more than the cross-country average of 2 per cent) experienced a sharp deceleration in growth in the 10 years following the democratizing transition.

In other words, the reason that periods of rapid economic growth come to a sad end is that the Cathedral comes after you. It is not regression to the mean, but Cathedral reconquest.

Lant and Larry notice that China is anomalous, different from all their other examples, in that unlike all their other examples, with the partial exception of Singapore, large and long economic growth has not resulted in “Democracy” – their prediction that China will not continue to grow is not a prediction that some mystery factor like “exhaustion of the low hanging fruit” will end China’s growth. It is in fact a highly pious prediction that the Cathedral will soon enjoy its inevitable victory, due, no doubt, to the forces of history.

When making highly pious predictions, Lant and Larry are less reliable than usual.

For many years, US statistics have been obviously fake, understating inflation by about two and a half percent a year, thus overstating real GDP growth by about three percent a year, and understating the fall in living standards by about three percent a year.

Thus, according to official statistics, US real GDP is still higher than that of China.

Yet, by every measure of actual stuff and technological capability, Chinese production is substantially greater than US production, though Chinese GDP per head is still below the US. China produces more cars, more concrete, more electricity, Chinese buy more cars, more concrete, more electricity, China exports more stuff, China imports more stuff. China produces and consumes more beer, more pork, and far, far, far more steel.

And it is not just tee shirts. China exports twice as much high tech stuff as the US does. China produces and consumes more high tech stuff than the US does. We sell them low tech stuff like wheat, we import high tech stuff like phones. China has the fastest trains in the world, and very large numbers of ordinary people using those very fast trains. China has the coolest airports, and these airports have far more people using them than the US.

OK, what about GDP per capita?

Officially, US GDP per capita is growing. In actual fact, it is obviously falling. Last time I walked around familiar places in America everything was shabbier, older, dirtier, more in need of a coat of paint. US GDP is falling at about two percent a year (used to be falling at about one percent a year, but the decline is visibly accelerating).

US population growth is about 0.6% per year (white population collapsing rapidly due to inability to reproduce without an enforceable system of marriage) so real GDP per capita is falling at about two and half percent per year. This represents a rapid acceleration in the rate of decline.

Chinese real GDP per capita is rising at about seven and a half percent a year. Assuming current trends continue, rather than continuing to accelerate, Chinese real GDP per capita will exceed US real GDP per capita in sixteen years, in 2030.